Photo by Julie Skarratt
Described as “exciting…combining boom-crash orchestration with woozy portamenti and jazz elegance” by The New York Times, and “a force to be reckoned with” by Observer, the music of Australian composer Jack Frerer (b. 1995) has been commissioned and performed by the New York City Ballet, the Albany, Nashville, Sarasota and New Jersey Symphony Orchestras, the Kennedy Center Opera Orchestra, the Australian Youth Orchestra, the Tanglewood Music Center, and the wind ensembles of UT Austin, UNT, Michigan and Cornell, among others. Jack is the recipient of a Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Morton Gould Composers Award from ASCAP, the Suzanne and Lee Ettelson Composers Award, and the Brian Israel Prize from the Society for New Music. He was a fellow at the Tanglewood Music Center, and Composer-in-Residence with the Arapahoe Philharmonic.
Recent and upcoming projects include Standard Deviation for the New York City Ballet Orchestra and choreographer Alysa Pires, a new Trombone Concerto for Greg Spiridopoulos and the Albany Symphony, and an Australian tour of Spiral Sequences by the Esmé Quartet for Musica Viva Australia.
As an orchestrator & arranger, Jack has created arrangements for WQXR, Nu Deco Ensemble, the American Composers Orchestra, the Cape Town Philharmonic, the Albany Symphony, drummer Marcus Gilmore, operatic baritone Will Liverman, and guitarist Yvette Young. Recent film and production credits include the score for dance film Virtuality for BalletX, and the short film Always Summer directed by Alexa Eve. Jack served as recording engineer for the album Cityscapes by Shouthouse, released by New Amsterdam Records in 2019, and produced The Roof, a series of collaborative films and performances featuring New York City-based choreographers and performers.
Jack currently resides in Miami Beach, and serves on the Theory and Composition faculty of the University of Miami’s Frost School of Music. He holds degrees from The Juilliard School and Yale School of Music where he studied with John Corigliano, Chris Theofanidis, David Lang, Aaron Jay Kernis and Martin Bresnick.